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Sports Car Club Autocross Results Analysis

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Prepared by: Kurt Klingensmith

Purpose: Analyze the results of the Sports Car Club Autocross to understand who is competing and determine how car make, year, and course layout may have impacted performance.

Key Objectives:

• Provide summary statistics and information.
• Explore and visualize performance of the drivers.
• Identify any insights from the data for the event organizers.

What is Autocross?

The local Sports Car Club has granted us use of a dataset, with anonymized driver names, for this analysis. Autocross is an event where drivers navigate a course constructed from cones. Cars are categorized in classes set by the Sports Car Club of America. A quicker time is better than a slower time. Below is a photo of the JNaaP author driving the course.

Analysis Key Findings:

• While the fastest car was older, in general, newer cars outperformed older cars.
• Not only were Hondas the most prevalent make, but they also tended to outperform other makes.

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Table of Contents

• 1  Setup and Data Loading
• 2  Analysis and Visualization
  • 2.1  Event Summary
  • 2.2  Entrants Analysis
    • 2.2.1  What car manufacturers were represented?
    • 2.2.2  What years were the cars manufactured in?
    • 2.2.3  How many cars by make were in each class?
  • 2.3  Performance Analysis
    • 2.3.1  Who performed the best, and how does this compare to the field?
    • 2.3.2  How does Car Make relate to raw time?
    • 2.3.3  Are older cars at a noted disadvantage on this particular course?

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Setup and Data Loading

Dataframe successfully loaded!
The dataframe shape is: (105, 6)

The first three rows of the dataframe are:

	Position	Class	CarID	Car	Raw Time	Driver
0	1	SMF	141SMF	1990 Honda Civic DX	25.344	Driver 1
1	2	STU	43STU	2018 Honda Civic Type-R	25.784	Driver 2
2	3	SMF	41SMF	1990 Honda Civic Si	26.023	Driver 3

After conducting some data preparation, the dataframe shape is now: (105, 10)
The first three rows of the dataframe are:

	Position	Class	CarID	Car	Raw Time	Driver	Car Year	Car Make	Car Model	Car Model Type
0	1	SMF	141SMF	1990 Honda Civic DX	25.344	Driver 1	1990	Honda	Civic	DX
1	2	STU	43STU	2018 Honda Civic Type-R	25.784	Driver 2	2018	Honda	Civic	Type-R
2	3	SMF	41SMF	1990 Honda Civic Si	26.023	Driver 3	1990	Honda	Civic	Si

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Analysis and Visualization

Event Summary

Event: Sports Car Club Autocross
 
Total Number of Competitors: 105
 
Performance Overview:
• Fastest time of the day: 25.344 seconds by Driver 1
• Slowest time of the day: 37.439 seconds
• Average lap time: 28.914 seconds
 
Car Overview:
• Unique Car Manufacturers: 22
• Most common manufacturer:  Honda
• Most common car model:  Civic
• Fastest car of the day: 1990 Honda Civic DX driven by Driver 1

Class Overview:
• Number of classes represented: 25
• Class that produced the top time: SMF

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Entrants Analysis

What car manufacturers were represented?

What years were the cars manufactured in?

Average year of car: 2007.7
• Oldest car: 1971
• Newest car: 2021
• Most commonly occurring year: 2019

How many cars by make were in each class?

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Performance Analysis

Who performed the best, and how does this compare to the field?

Fastest car of the day: 1990 Honda Civic DX driven by Driver 1

The field remains tight expect for the top 2 breaking into the 25 second range and
the bottom performers faring significantly worse.

How does Car Make relate to raw time?

Note that Hondas generally performed the best. Possible takeaways:
• Hondas are the best performing cars for this type of course.
• Honda drivers were generally more talented than the field.
• The course layout may have favored smaller cars.
• Or, a combination of the above factors contributed to Honda's success.

Are older cars at a noted disadvantage on this particular course?

The correlation between performance and year is: -0.13013

This weak negative correlation implies we can expect minor improvements in
performance (lower raw time) as a car's age decreases.

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POC: Kurt Klingensmith

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